The present invention relates to the field of encoding data for serial transmission in a transmission means, and is particularly applicable, but not limited, to the field of the optical communication systems.
Optical communications systems are a substantial and fast-growing constituent of communication networks. The expression “optical communication system”, as used herein, relates to any system which uses optical signals to convey information. Such optical systems include, but are not limited to, telecommunications systems, cable television systems, and local area networks (LANs). Optical communication systems are configured to carry information in modulated beams of light carried over optical fibres. However, the optical fibres in use today have characteristics that limit the speed and distance of data transmission.
A dispersive fibre broadens an input pulse causing intersymbol interference at the receiver and limiting, for a prefixed data rate, the maximum connection distance. As this effect is due to the non-linear shape of the fibre phase response around the optical carrier frequency, a signal with a narrower bandwidth should suffer less from chromatic dispersion. A way to reduce the signal bandwidth is line coding, and one proposed candidate is the duobinary code.
Duobinary is a widely used code scheme in which a “0” (“zero”) bit is represented by a zero-level electric current or voltage and a “1” (“one”) bit is represented by a positive-level current or voltage if the quantity of “0” bits since the last “1” bit is even, and by a negative-level current or voltage if the quantity of “0” bits since the last “1” bit is odd. This logic can be reversed, exchanging the words “bits 0” and “bits 1” in the above discussion. Recently other line coding schemes, called Phrased Amplitude-Shift Siginalling (PASS) codes and based on a modification of the duobinary one, have been proposed by Stark et al. in “Line coding for dispersion tolerance and spectral efficiency: duobinary and beyond” Proc. OFC'99, 1999, vol. WM46-1, pp. 331-333.
An alternative coding scheme referred to as Phase-Shaped Binary Transmission (PSBT) has been described by Penninckx et al. in “The phase-shaped binary transmission (PSBT): a new technique to transmit far beyond the chromatic dispersion limit,” IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 259-261, February 1997.
The performance of such coding techniques may be accurately evaluated and compared via an analytical method recently proposed by one of the present inventors in E. Forestieri, “Evaluating the error probability in lightwave systems with chromatic dispersion, arbitrary pulse shape and pre- and post-detection filtering”, submitted to J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 18, n. 11, November 2000.